Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition.

Paul Corby Finney, ed., Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition

Grand Rapids. Eerdmans, 1999. xviii + 46 pls. + 539 pp. $65. ISBN: 0-8028-3860-X.

Catharine Randall, Building Codes: The Aesthetics of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe 

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. xii + 304 pp. $36.50. ISBN: 0-8122-3490-1.

Because of the emphasis of Zwingli and Calvin on God and the activity of God in Christ, which were both invisible and unlocatable except in the transformed self, both reformers were suspicious of what is visible and externally locatable. This had consequences for the inherited tradition of the Western church as regards ecclesiastical art forms, much of which was deemed in the Reformed tradition to be in flagrant breach of the second commandment. Although this resulted in iconoclasm, it should not be concluded that the Reformed tradition shunned all art and art forms. These two books testify to the positive contribution of the Reformed tradition to the arts.

The collection edited by Finney is a beautifully produced volume, with many black and white illustrations in addition to the plates. Most of the essays were originally presented as papers at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton in 1998. An introduction by Dan Hardy presents an overview, noting the nuanced differences amongst the Reformers on this issue. Yet whatever the differences, the result was a disengagement from the religious use of art. However, the rest of the essays illustrate that in practice ways and means were found to circumnavigate this apparent repudiation. Philip Benedict gives an overview of "Calvinism" as a culture, noting that while some Reformed were tearing down altar-pieces, a few were employed by Catholic patrons as painters and sculptors of Catholic religious art. Christopher Stell focuses on Meetinghouses in England, and begins by debunking the claim of Horningsham Chapel to date from 1566. In fact it dates from circa 1700, and the brick which carries the sixteenth-century d ate is nineteenth century.

The Meetinghouse at Walpole, Cambridgeshire housed a congregation that had originally met in Cookley a mile a way. But after debunking claims to antiquity, Stell sets out to look at the distinctive contribution of buildings such as Langley Chapel, Toxteth, and Bramhope. The rich woodwork of the interior and elegant pulpits are art to the glory of God. James Lomax describes the work of the Huguenot goldsmiths in England, from exotic Protestant church plate to coffee pots and censers for Catholic worship. Helene Guicharnaud tells the tale of the Huguenot "Temples" in France, practically all destroyed after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Edict of 1598 allowed freedom for Reformed worship, providing that the buildings were distinguishable from Catholic churches. Using plans, drawings, and contractual documents, she describes the distinctive features of these buildings, with galleries, and interior decoration consisting of loyalty to God and King -- the Ten Commandments and the Royal arms. Matt hew Koch looks at the distinct contribution of the South of France, which inherited an austerity from the culture. Raymond Mentzer also surveys French Protestant architecture, with some very human touches from consistory records, such as disputes over Temple benches. This essay also considers the design and use of communion tokens. A shorter essay by Betsy Rosasco discusses a sixteenth-century Limoges enamel tazza, illustrating the judgment of Moses, and Mary Winkler considers whether the portraiture of Calvin was representation, image, or icon. The editor takes as his subject Beza's Icones. Other essays discuss the Huguenot contribution in Brandenburg-Prussia, Hungarian Reformed church wall and tile painting, the landscapes of the Dutch painters, and Dutch prints. The final essays turn to the New World, with particular studies of the rebuilding of the Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut from Meetinghouse to Sanctuary for God, as well as a broader canvass of this evolution by James White.

This is an impressive and informative collection, showing the richness that grew out of the austere theology. There are gaps -- more could have usefully been said of Scotland, and it is unfortunate that neither treatment nor illustration was given of the highly ornate pulpits of the Dutch Reformed tradition. But the collection dispels the idea that Calvinism made no contribution to the visual arts.

Catharine Randall's book is much more technical. It attempts to trace a trajectory from Calvin's theology of space to the designs and structures produced by several famous architects and garden landscapers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, suggesting a physical expression of the theology. Randall notes that Calvin's understanding of space finds expression in the extra calvinisticum and his theology of the Lord's Supper. She argues that he used city-space as a laboratory. The scheme of the Institutes, so she declares, proceeds spatially as a sort of literary layer built upon the original groundwork of scripture and contains the theory of how Genevan city-space should be reassigned to represent as clearly as possible God's church on earth. While this is partially true, the Trinity is a far more central concern than space, and Randall's statement that the Institutes was written in Strasbourg after his expulsion from Geneva seems to overlook the fact that the first edition of 1536 was mostly written in Basel. Her thesis would need to explain the difference in arrangement between the 1536 and 1539 editions. Randall proceeds to discuss particular Reformed architects who were commissioned to design and build Catholic structures, attempting to find in their designs the tension between their theological convictions and the constraints of their work. Bernard Palissy and Philibert de l'Orme each have a chapter, and Jean Bullant, Olivier de Serres, Jacques Boyceau, Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, and Salomon de Brosse share a chapter under second-generation" Calvinist architects. Whether she proves satisfactorily that their designs contained an encoded Calvinist understanding of space, each reader must judge. At times the argument seems strained, and just a little too imaginative.